Few questions on updating a dinosaur

Question 1

My parents have an old Dell Dimension T2350 (yes it’s old and painful to use) they surf the net only and have slow speeds as you can imagine. It has only 256k ram to work off of. I want to add a stick of cheap ($20-30 range) RAM to get them at least 512k. For them this will be a great increase in speed. But looking at all the options on New Egg Speed / timing installed in sets or single sticks not sure which one to use? Pc3200 Sdram 184 pin 333 ? 400 ? (Some show timing some don’t?) The system has only 2 slots for memory if I get a 512 stick should I pull the original and discard or insert it in slot 2 after the new one is inserted? And maybe get 768 out of it. The hardest thing this system processes is e-bay

Question 2

The CPU fan died on the original setup they had it replaced years ago by a local shop and ever since the replacement I found out they get a fan not found error on boot up. Press F-1 to continue. Not horrible thing to have to deal with every time but is there a way to get around this? (My guess bios does not recognize the fan and my guess the fan is at full speed all the time)

Question 3

They also have the annoying click here to load your XP personal settings (only one option shown) ever time they boot the computer. Anyway to set the system to bypass this and have it load automatically?

Thanks in advance

1: the ram is going to be expensive. getting ram off e-bay is iffy at best. if it is bad the buyer will say you fried it = no refund (been there, no fun). Ram will dumb it self down to fit the computer if it is close. It will also dumb down to the lowest of the 2 different speeds on 2 different sticks, as all ram in 1 machine needs to run at the same speed. It is prob 184 pin ddr.

2:There should be a setting in bios to disable the fan detection. or halt on = none.

3: probably a logon screen set up with no pass word. same place you set up screen savers and such in xp. just disable it or select none.



Honestly, be a good kid. get 'em a new built cheapy surfing comp and trade them. help them set it up. then take the old pc, get a few big old hard drives and a $50.00 vid card. turn the old beast into a myth tv box.(its like free tivo). give it to them for x-mas they will be most impressed.

1. Go to www.crucial.com and match ram based on their configurator thing. It works.

2. There are typically THREE prongs on a cpu fan. one of them is for the sensor. If the shop used a two prong connector or even a fan that used the 4-pin molex connector, then that's why the bios throws a mini fit. Usually you can change a setting in the bios to ignore the fan not being there.

3. Yes, a number of ways. The easiest is:
Start - run - control userpasswords2 - ok

Or you can download TweakUI and do it from there.

There are other options, but those are the most straightforward ones.

Question 1: according to Dell the Dimension 2350 series will upgrade to 1 gig total. So you could in essence put in the 1 512 and 1 256 to make it 768. However, it is a best practice to put in a matching pair (long thought anyways with DDR it is possible and it will probably not be noticed by said parental units). The memory is 400MHz fsb or the new coined term PC3200.
link to memory specs on dell's site:http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&category_id=6436&cs=19&l=en&s=d hs&mfgpid=161609&chassisid=8214

Question 2: There may be an option depending on the bios where you can turn off the notify if fan failure. However depending on the bios rev version it may be a blanket setting and this is something they may want to keep on in case of other failures

Question 3: refer to either of the answers from the 2 previous posters.


Hope this was some help.

Also I see you live in Minnesota. Home of the original Geek Squad, if all else fails have them give them a call or go to a precinct because after all, their cousin's, uncle's, friend's, neighbor's, brother is probably not a good computer technician.

1. The original modules were DDR266 (PC2100) modules. Whether or not newer (and cheaper/easier to find) DDR400 would work is a try-it-and-see proposition. New DDR266 modules are apt to be expensive, but you should have no problem finding them at flea markets and/or buy/sell papers or websites.

2. As has been said, there are typically three wires on a CPU processor fan. If the service people used a 2-wire fan, that could cause the problem. Or, they could have plugged the fan (2 or 3-wire) into a SYS_FAN connector instead of the CPU_FAN connector. There may or may not be an option in BIOS to disable the fan check., or you could get a 3-wire fan (and install it yourself!)

3. Go to START >> RUN and type in "control userpasswords2" (without the quotes) and hit enter. In the box that comes up, un-check the box that requires users to enter a password.